


under a jewelled sky

by wrishwrosh



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Regency, Attempted Kidnapping, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2020-10-01 17:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20344321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrishwrosh/pseuds/wrishwrosh
Summary: In which Tyson Barrie is unexpectedly kidnapped by a mysterious brigand and makes the best of things.or, A History of an Amateur Highwayman and his Reluctant Companion.





	1. I. In which Our Hero falls in the Mud

**Author's Note:**

> no gods, no masters, no genre conventions. im just here to fuck around with period-adjacent syntax, baby!

One of the late summer thunderstorms that so frightened Tyson as a child was brewing on the horizon, and the air was heavy with heat and moisture. The wind did little to disperse the oppressive thickness, only clattering branches together and lifting Tyson’s hair off his sweaty brow. Tyson no longer feared the storms, and he could navigate these familiar country lanes backwards in the dead of night; in fact, he had once done so in the execution of a youthful wager, with moderate success. But this storm particularly seemed somehow portentous. Something about the sound of the wind in the leaves, or perhaps the unusually greenish color of the clouds. Tyson was quite accustomed to ignoring portents of all kinds, of course, and saw no need to give this one undue attention. He had so few opportunities to be sensible.

Indeed, his lack of sense had become a point of some contention between himself and his father not ten minutes prior. Tyson knew, at the time, that it was foolish to make any suggestions about the method by which his father allocated his living as a vicar. After all, his father had been using the same method with no little success for years, and even if now there was no longer sufficient money to keep both a footman and a groom, or to buy fabric for Tyson’s mother and sister to trim their dresses in the latest styles from London, well. They did not need a footman every day, and no one had ever perished from the wearing of an only slightly threadbare frock several years out of fashion. After all, in all likelihood Victoria would soon marry well even though Tyson had proven unable to do the same. Tyson, it was suggested, ought to consider his heavenly rewards more carefully than his earthly delights, even if his calculations revealed that both were in reach. There had been some exchanging of words and slamming of doors and, suffice it to say, Tyson was summarily uninvited from the Benn’s fête that evening. Thus instead of playing a game of whist in the Benn’s comfortably appointed parlor, Tyson was riding through what now looked as though it would soon become a formidable storm.

Another gust of wind brought with it the beginnings of the rain, first a smattering of ice-cold drops and then a steadier downpour. The thunder ceased its distant rumbling and became a nearby crashing which startled Tyson and caused his horse to shy under him. He rested a calming hand on her neck, but she remained nervously alert, ears pricked. This reaction was odd; Tyson selected this particular mare for his sulk from his family’s remaining stock for her sweet, unshakable demeanor. Old Meg had taught a generation of the vicarage’s children to ride and could ordinarily be trusted to plod down the local lanes with perfect trust and utter complacency, ignoring completely any guidance her rider did or did not give.

“Hush, Meg,” Tyson said, but Meg did not. The rain battered Tyson, Meg, and the dirt road alike, and all were quickly drenched. This was not what Tyson had intended when he set out earlier in the afternoon. His suit—his second best—was soaked through, his horse had disobeyed him, and he could only imagine how entirely pitiful he looked with his hair slicked to forehead. When he returned to his home and his father’s gaze he would have lost any possible high ground and would most likely, with his luck, contract some miserable illness and be bound to his bed. “Confound it all,” he shouted skyward.

“Well, I do not think the rain is as bad as all that,” said someone, yelling a little to be heard over the storm.

Tyson could not recognize the voice, which was the first odd thing in a hamlet as small as his. The second and odder thing was that someone was there at all, as the path before him had been empty until Tyson had looked into the sky to lament. Now, however, the narrow tree-lined lane was entirely blocked by a man astride a fine horse.

For a brief and entirely disconcerting moment, Tyson was sure that the man on the horse had no face. In place of eyes and a nose, he could see only a wash of strange color and shape. He wiped the rain from his eyes, and the phenomenon resolved itself more clearly. Beneath a somewhat foppish tri-cornered hat, the man wore a painted mask.

Tyson was stunned motionless by the sheer strangeness of the situation. The man’s mask was finely made, incongruously so. Tyson had never been to a true masquerade; his father’s little parish was too small and too rurally practical to support such lavish events. But his mother had been invited to one such ball in her youth, during a visit to Bath shortly after her coming out, and she still kept the mask she’d worn, allowing Tyson and his sister to play with it as children. The man’s mask reminded Tyson of none other than his mother’s in form, covering as it did the top half of the face and tying with ribbons round the back of the head. It was painted all wine-red with golden filigree around the eyes so that they seemed to glow like small suns even in the pouring rain.

“Who are you?” Tyson asked. It was all he could muster. “An apparition?”

“I hardly think it matters,” said the man. It was a thoroughly odd thing to say, for the man must surely have been aware of what a curious figure he cut against the utterly ordinary wet wood.

“That cannot be true,” said Tyson in return. “I think I am well within my rights to be quite curious about you.” On second glance, Tyson became increasingly assured that the man was no phantom. The rain struck him as it would any other true being: drops rolled off the shoulders of his cape, soaked into his breeches, and dripped off the heels of his fashionable Hessians. On glancing once more, Tyson realized that the man’s hand rested on the glinting silver hilt of a finely polished pistol.

“Oh,” said Tyson.

“I think it would benefit us both greatly if you simply turned around and returned from whence you came,” the man said with a burning white smile. He did not move his hand from the pistol at his hip. “You could warm yourself by the fireside of the assuredly charming cottage from which you hail and forget your apparition entirely.”

Tyson had only an amateur’s eye for horseflesh, but the strange man’s mount seemed a fine stallion, well-turned and well-handled. He loomed in comparison to poor Meg, who was still unaccountably nervous. In fact, when thunder crashed nearer than it had yet, the man’s horse hardly twitched. Meg, by contrast, reared up with a sense of dramatic timing Tyson had not known her to possess and dumped Tyson directly into the mud of the road.

Tyson quickly determined that he was unhurt; Meg was a small horse and he had not fallen far. Mostly he was stunned and embarrassed, as all of the unusual circumstances of the previous handful of minutes crashed over his head like a wave. He lay on his back in the mud and hoped that Meg would have the wherewithal not to step on him. Was it geese that drowned in the rain? Tyson was not so much better than a goose.

“Blast it all,” Tyson heard the man say, before Tyson also heard him dismount and stalk over in his direction. He was immediately convinced death was imminent. He had not thought much previously about his own death, but it now seemed obvious that he would die in some undignified and strange manner: on his ass in the mud, to be shot by a dandy in an opera mask with his accursed disobeying horse as the only witness to his tragic, foolish demise.

The man reached him quickly, crossing the distance that separated them with long strides. Tyson could see at first only the mud-speckled toes of his boots, then the knees of his impeccably-tailored breeches, then the gleaming pale eyes behind the red and gold mask as he knelt at Tyson’s side. Tyson, seized by a terrible panic, imagined the man pulling that little silver pistol out from beneath his cloak. He sat up, heart racing, desperately casting about for some way to defend himself. It was as though he was watching his own hand reach out and slap the man directly across the face. The back of his hand caught on the edge of the mask, and the sudden shock of pain on his knuckles brought Tyson back to himself as the mask was ripped from the man’s face and tumbled into the mud.

Beneath the mask, the man was neither hideously scarred nor hideously ugly as Tyson had half-supposed he might be. In fact, he was almost stunningly beautiful. Tyson could not help but feel slightly betrayed by this revelation. If one was possessed of a beautiful horse, fine clothes, and statuesque posture, one’s dramatic Venetian mask ought to cover some type of unfortunate scale-balancing deformity. It seemed only fair.

Tyson had but little time to reflect on the unanticipated clarity of the man’s visage. Before Tyson could so much as hoist himself out of the mud, the man sighed deeply and hit him smartly over the head with the butt of the dreaded pistol. Tyson toppled backwards into the mud, and the last thing he saw was the brigand’s astonishing, scowling face hovering above him.

+

When Tyson awoke, which he was somewhat surprised to have done at all, he found himself lashed to a tree with neither the lane nor Meg in his view. Indeed, nothing was in his view at all besides trees and the brigand who had kidnapped him, sitting neatly on a log a few feet away, paying him no attention at all. Though Tyson’s clothes were still damnably soaked and practically encrusted with damp mud, the rain had stopped and the dim light implied that twilight was fast approaching.

Tyson shifted his shoulders and flexed his wrists, testing the strength of his bonds. To his dismay, they seemed quite capably assembled. Tyson had no knowledge of the proper way to tie a stranger to an oak tree, but he would admit that this strategy did not seem too far off the mark. He was arranged with his back to the bark and ropes around both his trunk and the tree’s, with his wrists and ankles tied in front of him as an extra precaution. That precaution was largely unnecessary, as Tyson had absolutely no idea how an escape from these circumstances might ordinarily proceed. He imagined he might gnaw through the ropes, or perhaps sharpen a stick (also with his teeth?) in order to cut them to pieces. Both of these options seemed rather more inconvenient and uncomfortable than simply remaining bound, and none too secretive besides. So instead, Tyson elected to pursue an altogether more familiar solution, and began to speak without thinking.

“You know if you’re hoping to ransom me, sir, you won’t get much,” Tyson said. “My father has no particular attachment to me, and it will likely be some time before my absence is noticed.”

The scoundrel did not so much as blink. He simply went on eating a portion of what Tyson presumed to be dried venison with a delicacy and precision quite unusual for a common criminal. Tyson imagined the way an ordinary brigand would eat: crouched ignominiously on the ground, he would fall upon the meal like an animal, slavering and gnawing. This brigand, however, neither slavered nor gnawed. Instead he very neatly shaved slivers of the meat away from the mass onto a clean handkerchief laid upon his knee. The knife he used for the task appeared, to Tyson’s untrained eye, to be sharpened to a dangerously, impossibly fine edge. The pistol was nowhere to be seen, but Tyson knew he ought not disregard it.

Only somewhat daunted, Tyson went on: “Certainly I would be enormously obliged if you could be so kind as to refrain from killing me. I don’t have any items of particular value on my person at the moment, but if you’d like to rob me blind and leave me for dead on the side of the road I should be delighted to cooperate.”

Again there was no response. For the first time since the masked man appeared in the lane Tyson felt as though he had encountered a situation which truly could not be talked out of. A sense of real danger settled over him, and a vein of cold fear ran down through his arms and legs. He set to babbling.

“Of course I could—I could perhaps ransom myself, in a way, if it is wealth that my good sir hopes to achieve in this venture. If you would only be so kind as to let me free, I promise on my honour to repay you for that kindness with any—reasonable sum, as soon as I possibly can—“

The highwayman cleared his throat, and Tyson’s voice dried up as though he had been struck mute. The man leaned towards him, lowering the knife and setting aside his meat.

“Don’t you think,” he said, a sardonic twist passing across his pale brow, “that if it were riches I was after I might have selected someone a good deal richer to apprehend?”

Tyson found that he could not speak. The honour he had so recently leveraged against his own health deserted him, leaving him entirely powerless to defend his family’s fortunes, temporarily reduced as they may have been, against such ill-mannered attacks. The personal offence—for Tyson had always thought himself to have, at worst, a somewhat bedraggled though still charming and dignified aspect—warred with fear in Tyson’s heart. The knife’s blade glinted nastily in the moonlight. The highwayman held the dagger in a loose grasp, but Tyson had no doubt that it could just as soon be against his throat as dropped to the ground. The distance between them was not too great.

“I shall do you the small justice of explaining your situation,” said the man placidly. He relaxed back into his previous position, returning to his meat as though he was merely addressing the ever-colder night air. “I do not wish to harm you, and neither do I hope to gain anything by ransoming you. I desired simply to pass quickly and quietly through this...charming hamlet, and might have done so unmolested if you were not so clumsy and your nag so poorly handled.”

Tyson stiffened as much as he could in his current position, stung by the scoundrel’s uncharitable assessment of his ability.

“You disagree?”

“I do, sir!” said Tyson. He was prepared to jump to an impassioned defense of his athletic prowess and his skill atop a horse, but the man raised the hand holding the knife, gesturing grandly as though he were a Roman senator addressing a crowd of thousands. Tyson shut his mouth.

“Whether or not you are in fact capable of riding a horse, the fact remains that you have seen both my face and my mask, and I find that it is in my best interest to be far from this Godforsaken backwater before you see fit to blab the particulars of my appearance to half the county. As such, I intend to leave you safely secured to that tree until I have departed.”

“What?” Tyson asked, affronted. His wet shirt clung to his chest. The mud had begun to dry on his trousers, and he despaired of ever cleaning them. He was exquisitely uncomfortable. “Please—please do not, sir.”

“No harm will come to you, of course,” the brigand explained. “I expect your little pony has already returned home, or if not someone will find her soon and shall waste no time in seeking her missing rider.”

He had quite accurately gauged Meg’s character as a horse, and her profound interest in being comfortably ensconced in her warm stable. Tyson, however, found himself greatly dissatisfied with this idea for reasons he assumed would reveal themselves as he continued to speak. “I wish you would reconsider, sir.”

“Oh?” the man asked, with a flick of his knife through the meat that was, in Tyson’s mind, unnecessarily extravagant. “I cannot imagine you are so delicate that you will not survive a single night out of doors.”

That was a fact to be debated. Tyson was not known among friends and acquaintances for either his strength of character or rustic nature, but rather for his uniquely powerful enjoyment of teacakes. “It is not that, sir. I meant only to ask that you bring me along with you.” Tyson had not planned to be so forward, but the moment he said it he knew it to be a true desire. He had been offered no previous opportunities to leave ——shire, and he was sure there would be precious few others after this one. Certainly not any so exciting, either.

The man displayed, for the first time, genuine surprise. He paused the movement of his knife midway through a slice of meat. Though the brigand recovered quickly, Tyson realized that he might have momentarily gained the upper hand in their strange negotiation. He drove onward.

“If you will forgive me my bluntness, I do not have many prospects and I do not expect to have many more after it becomes known that I passed a night unchaperoned in the wood with a strange man, and it will become known. Gossip moves about with unbearable speed in a village as small as this one.”

“If I have compromised you I do not recall it,” said the scoundrel. His voice was light and playful, belying any number of dangerous possibilities.

“It matters not what you have done, only what you might have. You were not wrong to call this place a backwater,” Tyson said with some bitterness. This brush with danger had made him both braver and more honest than he could ever recall being before.

“Come now,” said the brigand. “Many a reputation has survived a worse battering. It would take more to tempt you country folk away from the pastoral life, in my experience.”

“Then you cannot have met very many country folk,” Tyson said in return, a little annoyed at the constant mischaracterization of his own life. “Anyway,” he said diffidently, “I suspect it will be more interesting.”

The man laughed loudly, with his whole body. “I have no doubt of that. But now a more difficult question: what’s in it for me?”

“Company,” said Tyson. “And,” he supposed, “a somewhat greater assurance that I will not let slip any of the pertinent details of your identity.” Tyson had never before engaged in blackmail. He found it quite thrilling.

The brigand raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You make a decent point,” he said, unimpressed by Tyson’s daring. He yawned, looking contemplatively up into the canopy of leaves above them. Tyson held his breath in anticipation of a verdict.

“I suppose I can see no reason why you should not join me,” he said. Tyson could see many such reasons, and was delighted that his odd gamble had met with success. “Excellent!” Tyson said.

“It is a difficult lifestyle, and often dull,” the scoundrel warned.

Tyson was well accustomed to dullness, if not difficulty, and merely shrugged. The bark scraped his back through his jacket, which was still wet. “I would certainly like some excitement, but I do not _need_ it,” Tyson said. His life of late had consisted mostly of bickering with his father and watching the elbows of his jackets become increasingly threadbare. He suspected that a new form of dullness would be an excitement all on its own.

The negotiations over with, Tyson mentally applied himself to the practicalities. Then, finding the practicalities—finances, shelter, whether dried meat would be the only thing he would have to eat for the foreseeable future—to be somewhat distressing, he skipped over them in favor of further chatter.

“What should I call you, sir?” Tyson asked.

The man puffed up, sitting straighter than before. “Well, I have been called the Swedish Bandit, _Le Voleur d’Or_, or perhaps you have heard of the Archangel—“

“I have not heard of you,” Tyson said, and the man scowled. He seemed no longer so much dangerous as slightly petulant. “I meant to enquire as to your _name_.” Tyson could not imagine calling the man before him the Archangel. He would be entirely unable to do so without laughing.

The Swedish Bandit huffed. “Gabriel,” he said.

Tyson had never fussed overmuch with propriety, but some deeply held instinct prompted him to ask the man’s last name. If she were able to ignore every single other aspect of his situation, Tyson’s mother would have been quite proud. “Mr. Gabriel…” he said expectantly.

“I said you may call me Gabriel,” said Gabriel, crossing his arms.

That brief flutter of manners done away with, Tyson nodded. “Gabriel, then. Tyson Barrie, at your service.” Tyson, forgetting his current position, reached a hand out to shake and was stymied by the fact that his hands were still tied together. He cleared his throat somewhat pointedly.

Gabriel started. “Oh, yes, of course,” he blustered, brandishing his knife. He stood, and, with a few quick flicks of the blade, cut through all of Tyson’s bindings. The knife moved very quickly and very close to Tyson’s clammy and unprotected skin, and Tyson could not help but flinch.

“A nervous one, aren’t you?” Gabriel said smugly.

Tyson, who was nervous but also bolstered by the unexpected successes of the evening, stood a little shakily and rubbed at his numb wrists. “I’m not _nervous_,” he said, “only, isn’t that something of a waste of rope?” The leafy ground between them was scattered with cut-up bits of cord, not a one long enough to be useful as anything aside from a strange and unfashionable cravat. Gabriel had been just as enthusiastic about the untying part as the tying.

“Damn,” said Gabriel.

Tyson judged this to be an altogether auspicious start to a new life.


	2. II. In which Our Hero steals a Horse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> because i forgot to say in the first chapter, title is from the poem the highwayman by alfred noyes.

“You will need a horse,” Gabriel informed Tyson. It was the first thing Gabriel had said to him since they had emerged from the wood, summarily ignoring Tyson’s flood of questions regarding where they were going, whether Gabriel had been eating venison or some other variety of meat, and whether Tyson could avail himself of that presumed venison. He suspected that Gabriel was trying to be mysterious.

“I don’t suppose you could walk _your_ horse,” Tyson said. Tyson felt somewhat undignified walking as Gabriel rode, scrambling along beside the horse’s dignified step.

“Certainly not,” said Gabriel. “Impossibly damaging to my reputation.”

“And what reputation is that,” Tyson muttered. Tyson was not inclined to be charitable, as his clothes were still caked in steadily drying mud. The additional sludge pooling in puddles on the road did nothing to improve matters.

“I’ll have you know I’m wanted in three counties,” Gabriel said haughtily from fifteen hands above Tyson.

“I’m sure I do not know how that relates to my request,” said Tyson, his voice catching as he stumbled over an unseen root. His command of knowledge of these lanes was not, perhaps, as commanding as he had previously imagined.

Gabriel sniffed. “I am known as a _highwayman_,” he said, “not a common footpad. I would not expect you to understand the importance of these labels, but rest assured that they can make or break one’s credibility in a business such as mine.”

“I do not understand the difference,” said Tyson in a tone he hoped conveyed the degree to which he did not especially care to understand.

“Well, at some point you had better,” said Gabriel. “Anyhow, the horse.”

“Of course, the horse,” Tyson said, and then cringed at the accidental infusion of verse.

“As I have just expressed to you quite clearly, I cannot possibly keep unmounted company. Thus it is of the utmost importance that you secure a mount of your own. Consider it, perhaps, an initiation.”

“And where shall I find said horse? Perhaps I ought to go about kicking at hedges until one turns up,” said Tyson.

Gabriel snorted. “You’re a prickly one, ain’t you.”

“Aren’t,” said Tyson, drawing upon the spirit of a deeply hated governess whose particular bugaboo had been Tyson’s grammar, and whom Tyson and Victoria had driven away through a concerted toad-based assault. Barries did not take well to authority generally. In response, Gabriel was silent as Tyson walked into a low hanging branch.

Over Tyson’s ineffectual sputtering and swatting at the invisible miscreant, Gabriel said, “What was the name of your awful little pony? Egg? Nag?”

“Meg,” Tyson snapped. “Oh. You mean to have me _steal_ old Meg?”

“I shudder to think of the damage you might do with the charge of a finer horse.”

Tyson considered, and, failing to invent a better horse to steal, acquiesced. “I don’t see why not, I suppose. With any luck, Meg won’t even have returned home just yet,” Tyson explained. “She moves rather slowly, you see.”

“I have seen,” Gabriel said, stopping abruptly. Tyson had to crane his neck backwards to look at his face. Or, more accurately, to look at his mask, which Gabriel had spent several painstaking minutes prior to their departure cleaning and polishing of dirt, glaring at Tyson all the while.

“So. I would suggest you make a plan to secure dear Meg. I shall wait here,” Gabriel said, gesturing at a particularly thick copse which, Tyson realized, was a familiar childhood hiding place not far at all from his family’s vicarage. Disoriented by the darkness and the busy rush of running away from home, Tyson had not realized how close he had come to returning to that selfsame place.

“Well, all right,” said Tyson, and turned towards his destiny as a contemptible horse thief. It had become quite dark, and Tyson’s feet kept catching in the previously familiar ruts and potholes in the lane. The moon was full and its light bright, but the overhanging limbs of the trees hid Tyson and the lane equally from the light. The darkness reminded him of soup. He still had not had any supper that evening, and to some degree he wished the darkness _were_ soup instead of simply resembling it.

Tyson fervently prayed that Meg moved as slowly as he had vowed she would. If he promised to live a virtuous life evermore, perhaps Meg would be in the lane still, or at least contentedly eating the hedges as she so liked to do. If that were only the case Tyson would become Robin Hood; he would steal only from the rich—or he would convince Gabriel to steal from the rich—and he would give that bounty directly to the poor. Tyson had never become acquainted with anyone either particularly rich or particularly poor, so this plan had only taken very broad form when he rounded the final and most familiar bend in the lane. The house revealed itself, and then the paddock, and then it became abundantly and tragically clear that Meg was already in for the night. Alas, Tyson was doomed to be a sinner.

He looked back towards the copse in which Gabriel had promised to hide himself. He saw nothing in the darkness between the trees. Had Gabriel abandoned him? Had it all been a ploy to return Tyson home? It was hardly a clever or subtle plan if so, and Tyson half resented himself for falling for it. But then in the copse there was a flash of red and gold, and Gabriel’s mask swam out of the darkness as though disembodied. Following the mask was a single gloved hand waving Tyson onward. It was difficult to gauge any sense of emotion from only a mask and a hand, but Tyson sensed a distinct impatience.

“Very well then,” Tyson muttered to himself, and carried on. He crept furtively further down the lane, feeling somewhat like a criminal, which to some degree was true. After all, he did fully intend to steal a horse and if possible a change of clothes and some dinner. However, Tyson was not certain whether horse theft were a hanging offense if it was one’s own horse stolen from one’s own house, or if it wasn’t a particularly good horse besides. Under such circumstances, Tyson reflected, he was perhaps the last person in the county who could be suspected of horse theft. Only someone who was entirely unfamiliar with Meg’s foibles would consider her a horse worth hanging for.

Still, Tyson was almost overcome by nerves when he reached the gate. He rehearsed the steps of his crime in his head—first, he would saddle Meg, or perhaps it would be better to first slip into the house, and not attempt to disturb her until he was entirely ready to make his great escape? Thus Meg would not have to sit too long idle in the saddle, and Tyson would not have to sit too long in muddy clothes. His order of operations decided, Tyson set off towards the house in the shadow of the trees.

He approached the kitchen door with as light a step as he could muster. No-one was home, or so Tyson hoped. With any luck the rest of the Barrie family would still be safely ensconced at the Benns’, and no such domestic obstacles would arise in his path. He had almost achieved his goal and was reaching for the door’s very latch when, out of the darkness, there came a call.

“Oy, Barrie. What the hell are you doing there?”

Tyson groaned internally, and then, supposing that the jig was up, groaned out loud. “Doing nothing nowhere, Johnson,” he called back. Johnson had initially been the Barrie groom, and was now not only the groom but also the head and sole gardener and occasionally the footman. And, as if his workload had not sufficiently increased, he flat refused to keep his beakish nose out of Tyson’s business.

“And while you were nowhere doing nothing, what did you do to my poor Meg?” Tyson considered sneaking into the house as though he had not heard, given that discretion was the better part of valor and that. Then he reconsidered, given that Johnson was a loud bastard who did not especially like to be ignored.

Dejected and quite certain that his font of adventure had been stoppered at the source, Tyson slunk over to the stable where Johnson was lying in wait.

“I found her loose in the yard, Tys,” Johnson said the moment Tyson crossed the threshold. “Ain’t responsible.”

Tyson leaned against the wall uncomfortably. The stables were not his domain, being as they were full of mud and hay and unpleasant smells. “I was not finished with my ride,” Tyson said.

Johnson nodded at Tyson and his general state of disarray. “By the look of you, you ought to have finished long before now.”

“And when,” Tyson sighed, “have I ever done what I ought?” Having judged his suit ruined to the fullest extent of the word, Tyson sat down heavily in some hay. Johnson just squinted at him. Tyson had had a great deal of exposure to that squint, and its toothless ferocity was somewhat blunted. Just as Tyson was used to Johnson’s squint, however, so was Johnson familiar with Tyson’s sense of the dramatic.

“Go on, then,” said Johnson. “Tell me the whole story.” He bit idly at his thumbnail with one chipped incisor. Johnson acted as though he did not care what Tyson did one way or another, but Tyson knew that Johnson was starved for entertainment and Tyson’s actions were his only source.

Tyson sighed again with rather more flair, slumping further into the hay in what he hoped was an intriguing, dilettante-ish manner. “I am running away.” That sounded childish and Tyson was, despite all evidence to the contrary, a grown man, so he revised: “I am leaving ——Shire, and I expect I shall not return.”

“Leaving like a thief in the night?” Johnson said, with the bare minimum of curiosity in his voice.

“I have no wish to discuss my decision with my father. You understand,” said Tyson. Johnson nodded. There was no love lost between Tyson’s father and the family’s remaining staff. “Also if I am to be entirely honest with you, I was hoping to take Meg along with me. So I will not be _un_like a thief in the night, I suppose. It is rather dark out at the moment, so that is one major qualification met.”

Johnson laughed. “You never disappoint, Barrie.” Tyson, heartened by the lack of scorn, relaxed into the hay as much as he was able.

“I don’t mind shirking my duties for long enough to miss Meg leaving the stables,” Johnson said. “Though I believe I’m the only one who knows she ever came back. Likewise I don’t mind forgetting that.”

“Johnson, you’ll have my eternal gratitude.”

“Don’t want it,” said Johnson, already turning around to fuss with some inscrutable barnyard instrument. Tyson took that as his cue to leave, and scampered back across the yard to the kitchen. The door swung open under his hand with an unbearable creak. Tyson froze, though he knew that the cook would be fast asleep at this time of night, and even if she weren’t it certainly wasn’t unheard of for Tyson to be in the kitchen sneaking biscuits. If all else failed, she was French. While Tyson’s father adored the cuisine, he hardly trusted the people. She would be largely unable to tell tales to anyone who would believe her.

But the kitchen was empty after all, and no one was there to witness Tyson pinching a boiled potato and several spoonfuls of trifle left over from tea. He thought briefly about the sorts of foods that a highwayman might eat: hearty peasant stuff, of course, that would keep well while traveling. Being largely unsure which foods fit in that category, Tyson grabbed half a loaf of bread that he hoped would go unmissed and crept up the back stairs to his bedroom.

Never had he felt so relieved as when he finally peeled off his blasted wet suit. At this juncture the suit had largely dried into a foul crust of ex-linen, and removing it from his body took some doing, with more scraping and yanking than Tyson might have preferred. After a bit of internal debate and consideration of the stylishly slim cut of Gabriel’s trousers, Tyson changed into his newest and most daring suit and bundled the bread into a pillowcase along with a change of shirt and a hairbrush. Judging his running-away preparations fairly well done, he cast an eye over his muddy chamber. It was better, he thought, not to be sentimental, and so he turned to leave.

However, as he crept down the hall Tyson found himself seized, irrevocably, by a flight of fancy. He was often capable of wrestling down stray impulses, but succumbing to them had been so successful in the last hour or so that he found he could not bring himself to stifle this one. So absorbed was he in his new quest that he failed to note the nearing rattle of carriage wheels on the lane. Under normal circumstances Tyson was quite attuned to this specific rattle, which was possessed of an irregularity in rhythm speaking to half-hearted repair to the axle by a coachman who had too many other duties to care whether the fucking carriage rode even. Gripped by this powerful whim, Tyson did not notice anything was amiss until, in the yard, Johnson bellowed, “Hello there, sir, I hope your evening was a fine one.”

Tyson first froze where he was crouched at his parents’ bedside, and then, considering the ignominy of discovery in this position, bolted. He clattered back down the kitchen stairs and out the door, hiding in the lee of the house’s stone wall. His father said something which Tyson could not hear. Tyson held his breath. It was unlikely that his family would enter the house through the kitchen door. Such an action would require them to traipse across the lawn and through the kitchen garden, but if they did so, Tyson had absolutely no idea how he could explain why he sat squatting behind a rosebush with mud in his hair and a pillowcase full of bread. He waited, thorns pricking at the side of his face, some small part of him wishing that his mother would round the corner of the house and tell him he was a numpty for haring off on some ill planned adventure. Then, said that small part of him, he might take a warm bath and have a cup of milky tea and go to bed and then in the morning apologize to his father for his foolishness and it would all be over.

Then the shuffle of dismounting the carriage resolved itself into the distinctive squeak of the front door, and Tyson found himself relieved. From his position at the side of the house, Tyson thanked every saint he could think of that all the doors were so blasted creaky. In his subsiding panic he could only think of three, but the job was done. He took up his pillowcase and scuttled over to the paddock where Meg was waiting fully tacked.

Johnson was leaning on the fence beside her, ignoring the carriage still waiting unhorsed on the lawn. “I do appreciate the warning, my good fellow,” Tyson said, fumbling with the pillowcase, at a loss for where to store it before giving up and tucking it in his jacket. “Did they seem to note anything amiss?”

“Course not,” said Johnson, holding Meg’s reins as Tyson swung onto her back.

“The eternal gratitude is still yours for the taking.”

“Keep it to yourself,” Johnson said, but gave Tyson a nod and Meg a pat on the nose. Tyson nodded back and urged Meg out of the paddock and down the road into the dark. He did not look back at his family’s house, instead feeling one handed for the mouth of the pillowcase. In all the shuffle of his escape from the house, he feared he might have lost the most important item stored within. But on looking inside Tyson was relieved, for there in the pillowcase was his mother’s mask, glinting blue in the moonlight.

He arrived at the appointed copse, but Gabriel was not where Tyson had left him. Tyson stared deeply into the dark wood, searching for any gleam of red or gold and not finding a one. If Gabriel had left him after the ordeal of the past half hour, Tyson would be furious. He would have to strike out on his own, because returning home so soon would give Johnson a simply unacceptable amount of ammunition.

“Took you long enough,” said Gabriel from behind him, and Tyson nearly toppled off his horse from shock.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Tyson said, clutching his heart.

Gabriel came around to the front of him, grinning widely beneath the mask. “It’s a trick of the trade. I’m sure you’ll learn in time. Now,” he said, “shall we sally forth?” And so they did, riding on into the moonlight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> still got [tumblr](https://softbarrie.tumblr.com/), hit me up


	3. III. In which Our Hero plays with Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm back, and i've learned a valuable lesson about outlining, which is that i shouldn't bother because i don't listen to myself! this chapter was not at all on my outline, and the chapter count has been adjusted accordingly.

The first night, Tyson and Gabriel (and Meg, and Gabriel’s stallion, who he had yet refused to name) rode on for hours through the darkness. Tyson, brimming with chaotic adrenaline, scanned the trees around them for unseen threats and agents of the law.

“You’re likely to unscrew your skull if you keep up swiveling your head like that,” said Gabriel, at what Tyson judged to be an irresponsible volume.

“I only think one of us ought to be vigilant,” Tyson hissed in response. “One never knows who is out and about at this unseemly time of the evening.”

Gabriel laughed. “Anybody on the road at this time of night is keeping a wary eye out for the likes of us. You’re riding with the bogeyman now, Mr. Barrie.”

Tyson contemplated this statement. Of course it was patently ridiculous for Gabriel to refer to himself as such; no bump in the night Tyson had ever feared was possessed of such a fine figure nor such a poor sense of humor. But it was true, he supposed, that he was now a criminal and a horse thief, riding with a masked man who carried a gun.

“What about other bogeymen?” he asked. He thought this a perfectly sensible question; for what would happen if they crossed paths with another masked man, who perhaps might possess two guns? 

“What?” said Gabriel. He looked between Tyson and the trees as though he suspected Tyson of spotting one such shadow in the wood, which was not reassuring.

“What might happen if we run across another highwayman? Or perchance highwaymen?”

“Oh, there’s a code of honor with these things,” Gabriel said airily. Tyson did not believe him for a moment. He and Gabriel had only been acquainted for a pittance of hours, but Tyson was already decently suspicious of Gabriel’s easy answers. As a person quite used to being managed, he was familiar with the sensation. Tyson knew from patronizing nods, and Gabriel was rather proficient in the art.

“What does this code of honor demand?” Tyson asked. “Are we to part with a nod and a handshake? Or we wrestle as the Greeks do, and the winner of the bout gains the right to the winner’s horse and good name?” Under-rested and over-excited, Tyson was unraveling.

Gabriel seemed briefly stymied by this partly coherent barrage. “I—well, I suppose you shall see when we meet someone.”

“I would only like to be prepared if I am to be expected to duel a rival criminal to the death.”

“Oh, I daresay I hear someone coming,” said Gabriel, unconvincingly. “Best be quiet now, Mr. Barrie.”

They rode on in silence, Gabriel’s dignified and Tyson’s rather less so. There was little Tyson liked worse than quiet; his natural tendency towards the effusive and noisy was difficult to stifle, and even the fear of somehow coming across a magistrate or perhaps a company of other brigands with rifles could not repress his instincts fully.

“You mind stopping that coughing, Mr. Barrie?” Gabriel asked. His voice had a certain politely restrained quality with which Tyson was intimately familiar.

“It is a perfectly natural physical impulse, sir,” said Tyson, casting about for an argument. “I do not know how you would expect me to quash it, as such.”

“I recommend you try,” Gabriel said, and so Tyson traded coughing for humming. Tyson had hardly got through two hummed interpretations of Greensleeves before Gabriel’s shoulders hunched to a position that must have rightly been uncomfortable.

“Oh, look,” said Gabriel. “It is nearly dawn. We might now stop to make camp, if you are amenable.”

Tyson stopped in the middle of the second verse of his third Greensleeves to say “I shall defer to your greater expertise, sir.” He had not thought to bring his watch with him in his grand escape, and therefore had not the faintest idea of dawn’s proximity. Gabriel led their small party directly off the road and into a dense copse of trees a small distance from the roadside, dismounted, and began shuffling about in what Tyson guessed was a camp-making way. Tyson dismounted also and applied himself to wrestling with Meg, who had decided to become intractable. He had almost succeeded in tying her reins to a tree when Gabriel coughed significantly from somewhere about knee-high.

“Do you know how to start a fire, Mr. Barrie?” Gabriel asked. He was kneeling in the dirt, looking expectantly at a neat arrangement of assorted twigs which Tyson supposed must be kindling.

Tyson snorted and then realized that Gabriel was fully serious. “Oh, no, I do not. Gentlemen do not start their own fires, Gabriel, or else what would the parlor maid have to occupy her time?” It had also been jointly judged some years ago by his mother, his nurse, and the aforementioned parlor maid, after an incident with a bread roll and some coals that were hotter than they initially appeared, that the less time Tyson spent around fire the better. Even after the nurse was outgrown and the parlor maid politely dismissed for lack of funds to pay her, Tyson was heartily discouraged from involving himself in such matters. He thought it prudent not to share these details with Gabriel.

“Then I suppose it’s my duty to teach you,” Gabriel said, grim. He brandished a rock and, demonstrating an impressive commitment to ill-humour, asked, “do you know what this is?”

“I should suppose it is a rock, but I suspect you will tell me some information to the contrary or you would not have asked,” said Tyson cheerfully. While he would be the first to admit that he had not given Gabriel much opportunity to gain confidence in his faculties, he was certain he could be trusted to call a stone a stone. With only a small amount of thrashing, he successfully secured Meg to the tree and leaned over to look closer at Gabriel’s stone.

“It’s flint,” Gabriel responded. His tone quite eloquently communicated how extraordinarily obvious he considered this information. “You strike it to start a fire.” Gabriel paused, considering. “Fire is something hot, which burns.”

Tyson huffed and knelt beside Gabriel, snatching the flint out of his hands and pointedly ignoring both both the rudeness of doing so and the brief collision between their bare fingertips. 

“Look at me, a Barrie, shuffling about in the dirt, fussing with rocks and sticks and a strange man!” he muttered. “What _would_ my father think of me.” Beside him, Gabriel deigned to allow the rhetorical and Tyson decided to reward him for his forbearance. “I can tell you what my father would think. He would be horrified.”

Gabriel grinned behind a hand, and Tyson, again overtaken by his own daring, offered a smirk in return. He allowed his eyes to linger for an indulgent moment on the proud line of Gabriel’s neck and jaw, set off to some advantage by his white cravat and equally bright smile in the moonlight. Then, in the interest of limiting his immoderacy before Gabriel could notice it and make Tyson the subject of a smug jest, he took it upon himself to strike the flint. Gabriel had neglected to mention _how_ or _on what_ to strike the flint, but Tyson was unafraid of experimentation. He should perhaps have been a bit more wary of it, because striking the flint against the wet dirt yielded no results (though he might rightly have expected that outcome) and vaguely batting it against Gabriel’s neatly triangular pile of sticks only caused said sticks to topple over. Gabriel remained pointedly silent throughout the whole ordeal.

“I feel as though you might be laughing at me,” Tyson said, squinting in Gabriel’s direction.

“Ah, well,” said Gabriel, “you did rather interrupt me amidst my explanation of _how_ to start a fire. Though I am impressed by your initiative.”

Gabriel snatched the flint back and twisted it jauntily between his fingers like a traveling magician Tyson had once seen. The sleight-of-hand was simultaneously more and less intriguing on Gabriel than on the erstwhile country-fair showman, as Gabriel was both much smugger and much more handsome than that gentleman.

“Don’t show off,” Tyson groused.

With a flourish, Gabriel produced another grayish hunk of material from inside his coat. Idly, Tyson wondered how the man managed to fill his pockets with such a quantity of miscellany without spoiling the fine lines of the tailoring.

“This, my dear Mr. Barrie, is steel. You strike the flint against it to create sparks. Sparks create fire.” Gabriel demonstrated the process, and sparks did indeed fly. “If you don’t mind, I think I shall take responsibility for our campfire for the foreseeable.”

“That seems quite sensible,” Tyson said. Gabriel rearranged the kindling and had a small, cheerful flame burning so quickly Tyson was almost inclined to accuse him of witchcraft.

“Voila, as the French would say,” said Gabriel, who Tyson was mostly certain was not French.

“Hmm,” said Tyson. 

“You ought to get some rest. We shall have a long day of riding tomorrow,” Gabriel said. He glanced at Meg, who was mouthing at her reins where they were tied to a low-hanging tree limb. “Or perhaps several long days.”

Tyson nodded, opting for the sake of peace to ignore this slander of Meg. He attempted to pat the cover of dead leaves beneath him into a more comfortable arrangement, with limited success. Across the fire, Gabriel had withdrawn, presumably from some new compartment of his coat, a rather cozy-looking bedroll. Tyson tamped down his jealousy, inching slightly closer to the fire. 

Really it was quite a warm night, fortunately dry and temperate, which could not be guaranteed even in this estival season. The fire crackled beside his head, and the sky was beginning to turn pleasingly pink around the edges, so apparently Gabriel had not lied about the coming of the next day. The man himself had, when Tyson was not looking, divested himself of his mask (answering a question Tyson had been somewhat hesitant to ask, but apparently Gabriel did not sleep in the thing), and the firelight caught quite nicely on his golden profile. Best of all, when taken all together, these individually agreeable observations rather drove home the fact that Tyson was no longer underneath his father’s roof. Perhaps Tyson would not be hasty in counting some of his blessings, as it were.

+

When Tyson awoke, hungry, the sun was high above their clearing, there was dirt in his hair and leaves in his mouth, and Gabriel was sitting primly upright across the ashen remains of the fire, staring at him.

“You snore,” said Gabriel. Tyson subtracted several blessings from his previous count.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't actually know how to start a fire without a lighter, which is probs obvious.   
i'm softbarrie on tumblr, if the spirit moves u to come say hi

**Author's Note:**

> hopefully it isn't SUPER obvious that i don't know anything about horses and am in fact very afraid of them.
> 
> come say hey on [tumblr](http://www.softbarrie.tumblr.com)!


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